Cultural

Stella Margetson describes how English drama arose from the series of religious plays in which men of the Middle Ages expressed their profound, but direct and simple faith.

Peter Petrie profiles an American journalistic pioneer, the founder and first editor of the New York Herald newspaper.

Ivan Morris describes how the idea of heroic failure has always exerted a strong hold on the Japanese imagination.

L. Curtis Musgrave describes how willingness among medieval students to battle for their rights’ that, during the course of years, helped to shape the modern university system.

Alan Haynes profiles a satirist, playwright and man of letters; Aretino led a prodigal and adventurous life in late Renaissance Italy.

Desmond Seward describes an outstanding colonial achievement of the Middle Ages.

J.A. Boyle describes how the Venetian traveller’s account of his travels sometimes tried his friends’ credulity.

David Jones profiles the man of whom Gibbon wrote: ‘the genius of Rome expired with Theodosius’.

Joseph M. Levine introduces the modern historians' forerunners; the men who invented the techniques and defined the problems of studying the past.

Stewart Perowne describes how, in the fourteenth century ‘the last of the Roman tribunes’, but one of the first of political liberators.